Cardinals’ Big Season Never Got Off the Ground

You say you’ve been out of the country for a few months and were hoping someone would fill you in on who’s who in the National Football League this season. Last you heard, the St. Louis Cardinals were the team to beat in the NFC East and one rumor had quarterback Neil Lomax running for governor.

You remember 1984 and Lomax throwing to Roy Green for more touchdowns than they knew what to do with. You remember Ottis Anderson plowing up the middle with linebackers clinging to his jersey. You remember Coach Jim Hanifan smiling. You remember the Cardinals missing the playoffs by a field goal in 1985, and you remember talk of a Super Bowl appearance in 1985.

You remember it well. You’d better sit down.

Stump Mitchell, running back for the Cardinals, has some news for you.

“We really laid an egg here in St. Louis,” Mitchell said.

And it case you haven’t guessed, it wasn’t golden.

The Cardinals, who bring a 5-9 record into Sunday’s game against the Rams at Anaheim Stadium, have been the biggest flop in the NFL this season east of San Francisco.

And just when the future seemed so bright.

Lomax was coming off one of those memorable seasons in 1984. He was the Dan Marino of the NFC, an emerging superstar whose best days were seemingly ahead. Four times in 1984, Lomax threw for more than 350 yards in a game. He finished the season with 28 touchdown passes and 4,614 yards.

This year, Lomax can boast of being sacked 53 times, ranking him behind Ken O’Brien of the New York Jets in the battle for the NFC’s Canvas Back Quarterback award.

But there’s a whole lot more to this story than Lomax spending a season on his backside. There are, oh, off hand, about 53 reasons to blame the St. Louis offensive line. And, hey, what about all those injuries?

Superstar receiver Green received a bad case of “turf toe” in the season opener and has been hobbled most of the season. Turf toe is a painful bruise usually caused by artificial turf, but Green somehow managed to stub his toe on the grass in Cleveland, making him the first player to contract “natural turf toe.”

With the 1985 Cardinals, it only figures.

“I can count on both hands the number of times Roy has participated in practice since the league opener,” Hanifan said. “That’s really tough on a quarterback.”

Green had 78 receptions for 1,555 yards and 12 touchdowns in 1984. This season he has 41 catches for 581 yards and only four touchdowns.

Running back Anderson, who gained 1,174 yards a year ago, bruised a calf muscle in week eight against Houston and is just now returning to the lineup.

This has become what Mitchell calls “the wasted season.”

There has been talk again about the Cardinals’ moving out of town after this season. The timing certainly seems right.

Attendance at Busch Stadium dipped to 29,527 in last Sunday’s win over the New Orleans Saints.

The Cardinals have gone through kickers like gum drops. They started the season with Neil O’Donoghue but gave him the hook after they could no longer tolerate his kicks doing the same. Then came Jess Atkinson, who had been released by the New York Giants earlier in the season. St. Louis finally settled on former United States Football League kicker, Novo Bojovic, whose previous claim to fame was missing two overtime field goals for the Michigan Panthers in a 1983 playoff game against the Los Angeles Express.

Hanifan figured to have a chance to be coach of the year this season, but now there’s talk that he may be boarding the first steamboat down the Mississippi River at season’s end.

There has been talk of replacing him with Denver Gold Coach Mouse Davis, creator of the potent run-and-shoot offense.

“It makes for interesting reading,” Hanifan said Wednesday via conference-call hookup.

No one has been able to put a finger on what’s wrong with Lomax or the Cardinals.

“I’ll tell you this,” Hanifan said. “Going into this season, for the first time since I’ve been back here, I thought we had most of the pieces together. I thought that we could be a good team. . . . We were starting to get the right pegs in the right holes.”

Unfortunately, they were black ones.

St. Louis made steady and encouraging progress heading into this season. The Cardinals, under Hanifan, were 5-4 in 1982, 8-7-1 in 1983 and 9-7 last season. So welcome to the pratfall.

One of the few Cardinals having a good time is Stump Mitchell, who has gained 808 yards filling in for the injured Anderson. Mitchell gained 158 yards last Sunday against the Saints and has made only six starts this season.

Mitchell isn’t blaming this season on a rash of turf toes or anything else. The Cardinals are just plain lousy, he said.

“It’s not the players we’ve lost so much as the players who’ve played,” he said. “We just didn’t do the things we did last year.”

Mitchell thinks all the preseason publicity went to the Cardinals’ heads. It was sort of the same thing the pop group Menudo went through. The Cardinals panicked when they had to come up with a hit single to go with the album cover.

“We got all the publicity in the off season,” Mitchell said. “And we let it go to our heads. I guess you’ve got to be used to getting that publicity and just let it go over your head. It was the first time in quite a while that any Cardinal team had got any publicity.”

So the Cardinals would be 11-3 right now if everyone had just left them alone? They might be fighting for a division title this Sunday had they been allowed to practice all season in a monastery?

“If we would have been ignored, we would have done much better this season,” Mitchell said.

Hanifan agreed that all the publicity might have produced some swelled heads, but said he warned his team of the consequences.

“It was certainly brought to their attention in training that each game and each season is a separate thing,” he said. “Obviously, it was brought to their attention in training camp from Day One. But sometimes that’s difficult for a young man to learn or understand.”

Much of the heat, naturally, has fallen on the shoulders of Lomax, who had a brilliant season in 1984. His numbers actually look good on a stat sheet. He has completed 239 of 425 passes for 2,996 yards and 15 touchdowns. But anyone who has seen Lomax play this season will tell you there’s something wrong. His watch isn’t synchronized with those of his receivers.

“Well,” Hanifan said simply, “Some of the people he was counting on weren’t there, mainly Roy Green.”

Because Green hasn’t been able to practice much, he and Lomax have lost that magic touch that was all the rage of the NFL back in 1984. One thing led to another, and so on and so on . . .

There are some who think this was the year for the Cardinals and that bouncing back from the “wasted season” will be difficult. After all, St. Louis has been a team on the verge for three years now.

“I’ll definitely feel the bitterness in the off-season,” Mitchell said. “Watching the other guys in the playoffs when we know we have the talent to be in the playoffs. What we have to do is work out like the Rams and the 49ers--the winning teams. We didn’t achieve anything last year. We were an exciting club, but we were 9-7 and didn’t even make the playoffs. We shouldn’t have let it (the publicity) get to us, but it did. As a result, we laid an egg.”